Money and Computing

Claims costs generally grew from 2014 to 2017, but selected issuers sometimes experienced wide swings in costs from year to year. Most issuers attributed the volatility in costs, in part, to large changes in the number and health of enrollees each year. Average monthly claims costs varied significantly across issuers in the same state. For selected issuers, differences in per member per month claims costs within a given state were often more than $100 — significant given that median per member per month claims costs were about $300. Selected issuers also varied significantly in their decisions to expand or reduce their participation in the exchanges and make changes to premiums and plan design. more »

A bill to increase the credit for employers establishing workplace child care facilities, to increase the child care credit to encourage greater use of quality child care services, to provide incentives for students to earn child care-related degrees and to work in child care facilities, and to increase the exclusion for employer-provided dependent care assistance. A bill to authorize the Office on Violence Against Women to improve the handling of crimes of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking by incorporating a trauma-informed approach into the initial response to, and investigation of, such crimes. -A bill to provide women and girls safe access to sanitation facilities in refugee camps. more »

"Foreign doctors have all kinds of different forms of training. But many are united by one common factor that seems to be operative especially in the Commonwealth countries — a great emphasis on the bedside exam and on clinical skills. In part, [this approach] was driven by the lack of ready access to all the kinds of sophisticated testing that we have now. But I think that kind of clinical training still serves me very well. It’s almost embarrassing to see how little emphasis we put on that here where the most glaring finding, one that could have been discovered by either a good history or by a discerning exam, instead requires this $2,000 MRI and interpretation to discover something that was really there for everyone to see and recognize had they only learned how to do that." more »

Brain scientists and pharmacologists don’t know how to measure if and to what extent marijuana causes impairment. Existing blood and urine tests can detect marijuana use, but, because traces of the drug stay in the human body for a long time, those tests can’t specify whether the use occurred earlier that day or that month. They also don’t indicate the level at which a driver would be considered “under the influence.” “It’s a really hard problem,” said Keith Humphreys, a psychiatry professor and drug policy expert at Stanford University. “We don’t really have good evidence — even if we know someone has been using — [to gauge] what their level of impairment is.” more »